Eileen Simpson and Ben White

EILEEN SIMPSON AND BEN WHITE (OPEN MUSIC ARCHIVE) This text responds to Everything I Have Is Yours (2019) by Eileen Simpson and Ben White (Open Music Archive), an artists’ film that takes as a starting point records produced during the first decade of the UK pop charts – 1952 to 1962 – and experimentally repurposes them in an on-going exploration of the limits of sampling and the possibilities of live collaboration. Originally published in Everything I Have Is Yours: The Commissioned Texts PAUL MORLEY T HE S T E ENTIMEN L I have some questions I want to ask Eileen Simpson IT and Ben White, two Manchester-born artists working T E with music who engage with network practices and TH IS IN information technology. Both were working individually in 2005 on similar projects connected with a search for meaning and new expertise through sampling found sounds and footage, and both began to experience copyright problems with the material they wanted to use. The arrival of YouTube and a proliferation of new broadcast networks had made a torrent of raw material increasingly available, but any investigative, creative use, however niche, personal or disguised, was limited by increasingly vigilant and restrictive legal frameworks. Some material, they noted with interest, had slipped through the cracks — if it was written by anyone who had died more than seventy years ago, or recorded more than fifty years ago, which tends to be from the rough-and-ready, strangely enchanting beginnings of the modern recording industry. The copyright of a composition and the product it appeared on was originally arranged around an estimated lifetime, so that eventually it would run out, and creative works, as a whole or in parts, could be released into the public domain. What Writer and broadcaster Paul Morley grew up in Stockport, and wrote for the NME from 1977 to 1983. He was a happens then? Could music that breaks free ever founder member of Art of Noise and the showrunner of the ZTT Record label, featuring Frankie Goes to make a noise again, or just become part of a Hollywood. He has written books about suicide, Joy Division, ‘lost list’ — an orderly, mute record of records the Bakerloo line, the history of pop and the North of England. He collaborated with Grace Jones on her memoir that don’t exist any more? I’ll Never Write My Memoirs, and wrote a best selling biography of David Bowie in 2016, The Age of Bowie. His biography of Tony Wilson will be published in 2020. 21 22 Simpson and White then began working together independent space for teenagers to occupy, to and formed Open Music Archive, combining with find themselves, and for better or worse begin a variety of collaborators to develop new ways of to take control of their own destinies and locate taking and retaking unrestricted material from their own events, opportunities and places of the past and radically reorganising its essence. worship. The charts as a system of estimation and “Not,” they say, “to be obsessed with the past self-serving commercial bias were discriminatory or with history, but to consider the future of in all sorts of ways, but left room for glitches, and this stuff.” the introduction of surprises, oddities and even actual signs of disruption. Around the exhilarating Everything I Have Is Yours is their latest exercise in idea of the universally agreed-upon hit song and randomly yet purposefully taking creative work the unquestionable, fascinating existence of a that has become ‘derelict’, outside the commercial definitive chart topper, secret and spectacular concerns of any company or owner, and re-imagining teenage life uncoiled. it under a new set of conditions from a completely new, unsentimental point of view. The project is — also a document that contains traces of a unique local history, in this case Manchester pop music, The song ‘Everything I Have Is Yours’ was written from a point where it all began, in and around the by Burton Lane, who is credited with discovering very early pop charts, listened to by music fans Judy Garland, and lyricist Harold Adamson, who born during or just after the Second World War who wrote the theme song for I Love Lucy. It was became the first set of modern teenagers. The first first sung in the 1933 film Dancing Lady, and then UK pop charts based on record sales rather than pre-rock and roll superstar Eddie Fisher’s version sheet music were compiled by the New Musical reached Number 8 in the brand-new UK charts Express pop magazine. Copying the exciting looking in November, 1952. It perhaps needed just a copy chart system of American Billboard, its enthusiastic or two in each of the twenty shops surveyed to editor Percy Dickins rang around twenty record rise so high. shops for a list of their best-selling songs. Initially, it was an awkwardly shaped, non-decimal Top “This is a song of the 1950s even though it was 12, but the addictive idea of a Number One song, written twenty years before. It comes from cinema, a chart of favourites creating glorious hits and where hits of the day often came from before shadowy misses, changed more than just music the charts made things official, and it is itself and the industry. repurposed in different films, and by being sung by the likes of Billie Holiday in 1952 and Shirley Before the pop charts, and the accelerated Bassey in 1962. It was a way of passing knowledge, routine of new sounds and constant, competitive experience and history from one generation to changes in style and tempo, there was a lack of another, a tradition we continue. 23 24 It’s typical of the songs we deal with, which tend cultivated modern value, would take a lot longer to be folk, jazz, blues, light opera, romantic ballads, to enter the public domain, unlike that unfixed, pop before pop was really pop, because parts of unclassifiable, primitively recorded stuff from them are out of copyright. If it’s freely available, before pop, and before teenagers, not seen as we’ll use it — even if it is not necessarily a great being sexy or culturally compelling enough for piece of music, there is always a sound, an echo, the music industry to care about. a breath we can use. We’ve found there is a real uncharted, outsider weirdness to the period. Up Eileen and Ben reconfigure this prehistoric 1952-62 to a point, between the 1930s and the early 1960s, period by following it through to what they perceive this song keeps reappearing in popular culture. It to be a logical, local and stylistic conclusion. They travels by film, on radio, on record, by cover version. invite some of those original teenagers, sixty, As one of many sources in this piece, it has a new seventy years later, to express in their own private, life and reappears again, not as a faithful cover serene code what pop music meant to them — those version but as part of an artwork. It can still exist that saw and heard the changes from innocent, as a story that is passed forward.” near word of mouth beginnings to complex algorithmically-driven network aftermath, from — characterful local record shops to despotic apps, from screaming to streaming. Simpson and White take this coming into being of teenage space, this special birth of pop, to be — between 1952 and 1962, from the rudimentary beginning of an official best-selling charts to just “Our work is not intended to be nostalgic. In fact, before the time the charts were dominated by precisely the opposite. It’s a constant worry that the Beatles et al. Coincidentally or not, as the it might be taken that way, just more fetishising Beatles began, keenly mopping up influences from of vinyl, but we don’t approach the past with kinetic Northern music hall and pre-chart music a sense of yearning for a supposed better time. to early American rock’n’roll, pop was sonically Nostalgia can be a kind of poison, an emotionalising and structurally revolutionised by the electronic of history, which we are definitely seeing in our divisions and multiplications of multi-track tape politics at the moment, a fearful return to some recording, its progressively more sophisticated illusional golden age that never was. We are not delights aggressively co-opted by increasingly interested in preserving the past and simply formalised commercial interests. These interests recreating it, but in attempting to recuperate the would lead to a campaign to rewrite the laws of potential of its collective energy inside a radically copyright, so that modern pop, with all its carefully different setting. A lot of the music we work with 25 26 was originally made with an energy and exuberance attractive but emptied poses, riffs and rhymes. that has got lost over time, and we want to inherit The grip that the charts once had on the mainstream that and extend its range, not lock it inside its has collapsed, the original concept of the trend- settled place in time.” chasing teenager Insta-distorted. But there is a way that the central rituals, private memories and — mysterious reasoning of the past can be renovated and revitalised as something new and spiritually It’s the remnants, and the echoes, resonating through useful. Everything I Have Is Yours is a signpost, time, like a folk song bouncing through generations, a blueprint, a proposal of how past music, dated its purpose changing, of a story that contains sound, outmoded processes, dismantled ideas, fascinated enthusiasm for the togetherness of music faded energies can be re-issued and re-generated that led to all sorts of Manchester groups, scenes, in a contemporary context without it being maudlin, clubs, movements, fashions, characters, designers, or dry and academic.

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